Connectionist and Statistical Approaches to Language Acquisition: A Distributional Perspective

Abstract

We propose that one important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analysing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analysing the properties of real language corpora suggest that a priori objections against the utility of distributional information for the child are misguided. We illustrate our argument with examples of connectionist and statistical corpus-based research on phonology, segmentation, morphology, word classes, phrase structure, and lexical semantics. We discuss how this research relates to other empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language acquisition.